DIY Law Firm Marketing

At GNGF we have been working solely with law firms on their marketing strategy and execution for over seven years. Over this time, in order to consistently provide successful legal marketing services to hundreds of law firms across the country, we developed a framework. We call this Law Firm Marketing the GNGF Way, or you will hear us refer to it as The GNGF Way for short.

Our approach as a law firm marketing company is not to obfuscate things by making marketing online seem like some magic hidden in a bunch of acronyms (SEO, SEM, SERP, etc.).

To Educate and Empower Lawyers to Grow their Business

That is our core purpose at GNGF and why everyone here is excited to come into the office every day.

It is very purposeful that “Educate” is first in our mission statement.

One of the reasons we feel so strongly about educating our clients is in reaction to other agencies intentionally muddying the waters with their messaging of “magic formulas” and proprietary knowledge. According to these agencies, you can never have success without using their hidden black box of knowledge.

We are proud of the experience of our team and the work we do, but we do not believe that we possess some magic marketing pixie dust that you can only get by working with us.

We are proud of the fact that our clients understand the why behind what marketing is successful. And we want to share that success by creating resources for those lawyers who want to do their own marketing work.

We see law firms trying to “DIY” their own marketing when they are just starting out and don’t have the budget to hire an agency for marketing strategy and execution. Other firms have recently hired an in-house marketing person, or are one of those strange lawyers who has decided they enjoy the marketing and business side of running a law firm more than practicing law. Yes, we know those kinds of lawyers DO exist!

We strongly believe that GNGF’s experience and passion can be a great value to lawyers that want to grow their practice.

However, if a lawyer wants to use their own billable hours and energy to learn everything that needs to be done to work on their own marketing, we also want to support those lawyers to grow their business.

Seven years ago, when we started working solely with law firms, we searched for books and articles that talked about law firm online marketing that incorporated the best methods within the professional rules of conduct. We were surprised to find very little that was helpful at the time.

We decided to fill this gap of information, and seven years and five editions later Online Law Practice Strategies is a successful book in the industry and a big part of our education resources for DIY minded-attorneys.

In addition to our book and resources, we publish a YouTube series and update our blog with relevant marketing content. Plus, at the beginning of 2018, we started GNGF Live, a bi-weekly live Q&A session on Facebook where we update you with the latest and greatest law firm marketing information and bring to you interviews with experts on the subjects of law firm marketing and the business side of running a law firm.

In addition to these education resources, we also have a number of tools that we are able to provide to law firms that want to help streamline a number of efforts.

GNGF Law Firm Marketing Snapshot Reports

Curious about your law firm’s online health?

There’s a lot of hearsay in the world of digital management. Wouldn’t it be nice to have some hard evidence? To see exactly how your law firm performs online, and how it stacks up to your competition?

Welcome to your very own Snapshot report! By comparing your online presence, accuracy, and performance to others in the legal industry, Snapshot reports provide you with intel on how your firm is performing, where it’s lacking, and most importantly, how you can fix it!

SEO and Online Competitive Audit

One of our SEO Campaign Engineers will perform a deep dive on your website’s SEO, the competitiveness of the important keywords in your industry, and the top few online competitors. Using our expertise and our agency-level tools, we will gather ranking information, keyword competitiveness, how much competitors are paying for keywords, traffic estimates, and more. With this audit, you can make a more informed decision on the right content and SEO strategies needed to propel your firm up in the search engine rankings to drive the right prospects to your website.

SEM: PPC and other Paid Advertising Audit

One of our SEM experts will review your goals with you and then dig into the metrics from your paid advertising analytics reports. We will compare your metrics to average estimates from our agency-level tools and our own experience and data managing hundreds of thousands of dollars in paid advertising campaigns for our clients.

If you are running Google AdWords or Facebook Ads, we can jump into those accounts and look at your actual campaigns and provide recommendations. Since we are a Certified Google Partner agency, if there are specific questions you have about your Google AdWords account, we can even reach out to our connections at Google and combine their opinions with our experience.

If you are looking to jump into paid advertising, we can provide recommendations on where to start, what to budget, and realistic expectations based on search volumes in your area and average conversion rates.

Reputation Management Dashboard

Your Reputation Management Dashboard helps speed up the effort to control your online presence and Protect Your Referrals by helping you correct online listings, and benchmark yourself against competitors.

Update Core Data providers

Over 300 website directories reference the four major data aggregators, Factual, Acxiom, Infogroup and Neustar/Localeze.

We know that these are the hardest to update without the help of tools and an agency. While it is important to fix inaccurate information when you see it around the web, you first need to fix your inaccurate business information at the core of the problem, the data aggregators.

We can help you fix your information at the data aggregators while your team works to clean up the rest of the directories where this dashboard guides you.

After this is completed, the likelihood that potential referrals find your business in local search will significantly improve.

If you want to offload all of the reputation management directory cleanup work we can also help you with that as well, just reach out to us via phone, email, or our live chat (just click the button at the bottom right of the page).

Online Review Management

Did you know two-thirds of people are more likely to buy from a store if they find positive comments about it online? Conversely, one-half are less likely to buy if comments are negative.

Online Reviews Dashboard

Our review management tool allows you to see where people are leaving reviews and how your reviews grow over time. This dashboard allows you to compare your reviews to the industry average and measure your top review sites. If you see a bad review, respond with a comment, if you see a good review, spread it around as much as possible.

This dashboard allows you to have increased visibility through your review seeking process. When you ask for reviews you open yourself up to the risk of receiving a negative review. This tool allows you to closely monitor for negative reviews and respond promptly and ethically. You can dig into the details and see what words trend on your top reviews vs. the words that trend on your negative reviews. This allows you to evaluate how your firm is serving your clients, where you can make positive adjustments, and what your unique selling propositions are.

Review Requests

It is a best practice to direct people to your website in order to leave you an online review. Our Review Requests widget helps you optimize your review generation efforts. We work with you to create a template to request feedback from your clients. Then we embed a customized widget on your website to obtain and showcase the positive reviews. The benefit of this is that, if someone comes to your website and leaves you a positive review, you can send them an email or give them a call to ask them to leave the similar review on Google, Facebook, Avvo, or Yelp as needed. If they leave you a negative review, not only do you have a chance to fix something but it is only seen by you and not available to the entire Internet.

Self-Led Branding

Our years of leading law firms and attorneys through our branding process have allowed us to package up everything you need to be able to conduct a branding exercise yourself. We will provide you with the very questionnaires, exercises, and tools that our own strategists use to define law firm brands.

In addition to the exercises and materials, one of our Brand Strategists will give you a call to walk you through each piece and how to use it in your office. They’ll share their own insights into running an effective brand meeting, as well as how to get the most out of each exercise to ensure you best capture your law firm’s unique qualities.

GNGF Optimized Law Firm Website Templates

We have created hundreds of custom law firm websites over the last six years, many of those have even won design awards.

In designing custom websites we have always focused on two major areas.

We build websites that are successful in ranking on search engines

We implement key components on each website to increase conversion rates.

We have implemented, tested, and reviewed website heat-maps, conversion funnels, tree-maps, and behavior flows to figure out what works best for law firm websites. We have optimized websites for site speed performance to increase load time which significantly decreases bounce rates (and some believe increases your search engine ranking too).

We feel that our branding exercises and creation of a law firm’s unique brand platform is one of the most useful things a law firm can do to propel all of their marketing. However, after talking to thousands of law-firms across the country, we realized that not all law firms have the time or financial investment to start with that exercise.

Yet, you must have a quality law firm website to support your referrals and lay the foundation for any future search engine optimization efforts.

Law Firms need a website that is not a simple Squarespace or GoDaddy template meant for just any business.

They need a website that takes into account the unique needs of a law firm, and a website that GNGF would be satisfied using as the foundation for any optimization efforts.

We took all of our data and developed a few law firm-specific website templates that incorporate the success of all of our studies and testing.

Our templates:

incorporate the optimization strategies that we know work for law firms.

allow for light branding customization, including logos, images, and colors.

are built with a mobile-first design, since we know that a majority of website visits to law firm websites are from mobile devices

are built on the WordPress platform, the largest web platform, which provides the ability to easily grow and incorporate other tools like live chat and customized forms. Not to mention the largest freelance support for any web content management system.

You provide the content and images or we can help provide content for you, either way, our law firm template-based websites can be customized specifically to your firm in less than 60 days.

Finally, we build and host all of this on our enterprise-grade hosting platform for added security, performance, and reliability.